Bob Kirby: The man behind the hat

From a farm town in Iowa, Bob Kirby has spanned the world as a steward for the outdoors.

Superintendent Bob Kirby of Gettysburg National Military Park stands atop Little Round Top. Kirby was named to the post in March after former superintendent John Latschar was reassigned. (Evening Sun Photo by James Robinson)

Editor's note: This article initially ran May 30, 2010.

Perhaps the way to tell the story of the new superintendent of Gettysburg National Military Park is to begin in California - San Francisco actually - where Bob Kirby was named day-camp director at that old brick fort on the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Those were the days he'd gather the inner-city children - the ones from the ghetto and the distressed homes - and bring them out to a Pacific Ocean that was wider and more blue than anything they'd ever seen.

Kirby would like to start there at least, with their faces as they snagged a rock crab or white perch with the donated bamboo rods and the squid he retrieved from the Dumpster behind a fisherman's shop.

It's a nice place to begin - with the blue ocean, the white sand and the shinning faces.

But there's a lot that came before that and some of the memories aren't quite so easy.

Like when Steven Lawlor, Kirby's roommate at the University of Iowa, was paralyzed in a car accident, his vertebrae crushed and the two girls sitting on either side of him killed.

Kirby says that's what spurred his "grasshopper" years, the time he dropped out of college - just months before graduation - stuffed all his life's possessions in a second-hand duffel bag and hitchhiked south.

Looking back now he says it all makes sense - the country boy from Fairfield, Iowa, who used to spend his nights "gigging" for frogs, now plants orchards and restores woodlands on a 5,989-acre park.

"I've always been interested in the outdoors and I'm just reliving what I did as a kid," he said.

But while the interest in the outdoors was always there, he admits it's the history that didn't come until later.

"When we were kids we'd go for these Sunday drives and if there was a historic highway marker on our route my dad would pull the car over and read it to us," Kirby said. "Mostly I was bored to tears but I remember those little vignettes of history and over the years the context has fallen into place."

Upon graduating high school, Kirby admits a career with the Park Service wasn't even a consideration. For him, the dream was of being a mechanic and motorcycle racer - aspirations that held little sway with his family.

"When I told my grandparents that, they had a fit and said they'd send me to any college I choose," Kirby said. "So to spite them, I said I wanted to go to The University of Hawaii and they were prepared to send me until my father interjected."

That same rebellious spirit took him in and out of four colleges over the years as he'd enroll in one only to drop out for another.

"I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do in life," he said. "My father James Joseph Kirby always used to say, 'Son, do something you love in life,' because he was an insurance auditor and he hated it. But I was stubborn and I didn't reflect on his advice."

After he dropped out of The University of Iowa - and after a brief stint at Parsons College, until the school lost its accreditation - Kirby says he joined up with a friend in the Navy and hitchhiked to Virginia, landing a job "clipping" sailors outside the back gate of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.

This is the part he preludes by saying what a wide, weird world it is we live in.

"I was a barker and it was my job to try and get sailors' sea pay from them," he said. "There was a row of whorehouses and bars and strip-joints and they'd come out the gate and I'd yell insults at the command to try and endear myself to the sailors.

Gettysburg National Military Park Superintendent Bob Kirby (second from the right) stands in front of a gun emplacement near Baker Beach in San Francisco. As a movie liaison for a San Francisco park, Kirby met Katharine Hepburn and Michael Douglas in the 1970s. (Submitted photo)

Then we'd entice them to come in this little store and sell them over-priced civilian clothes or cars."

Two months was all he needed of life as a "barker." Shortly thereafter, he packed his belongings in a borrowed sea bag and headed south with a buddy from the Marine Corps.

"It was a tough world in some ways with a lot of drug use and unsettling things and unhappiness," he said. "I had a few friends who were very nice people but they were prostitutes so it wasn't like you were going to go on a date with them."

He ended up at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, he said, with $39 in his pocket. Just enough for a plane ticket to San Francisco where he was hospitalized for a brown-recluse spider bite he had gotten while hitchhiking outside Fredericksburg, Va.

When released, he said he resolved to get his life back on track and he put up with an uncle who worked for the city's police department, while earning degrees from San Francisco State University.

Now comes the summer-camp part he likes to tell so much - with the Dumpster squid and those children who lived in San Francisco all their lives but had never before seen the blue of the Pacific.

And soon after, that summer job gave way to a full-time gig at Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

"There was a point where I didn't see my parents for five years," he said. "I could tell in their voices they were sad and worried and I was appearing to be an errant gypsy lost in the world without much direction . . . I was off cavorting in San Francisco for chrissakes. It was the land of hippies and drugs."

Eventually - as the San Francisco film industry boomed - he found himself working as a liaison between the Park Service and a multitude of directors eager to film along the shoreline.

"The first guy the park had was a real tight-ass and every time the movie company did something this guy kept shutting down the project," he said. "Of course, when I got in there I wasn't going to shut them down. I was having too much fun."

As a film liaison, he met Katharine Hepburn, was on a first-name basis with Michael Douglas and astounded Karl Malden with an appetite that had been known to include three steaks, a pot of beans and a couple of ice-cream sandwiches.

"They had a conference at that time and got all the big-name superintendents and regional directors from the Park Service together for a party at The Cliff House," he said. "Everybody got drunk as skunks and I was hanging arms over the director of the Park Service."

And during those warm California nights - when he wasn't "hanging arms" over congressional appointees - Kirby said the rangers would build a campfire overlooking the Pacific.

"They were just easy, carefree days and we were thought of as these kind of urban-hippie rangers," he said. "Really, we were just a couple of kids in uniforms telling big people what to do."

But the whole "Haight-Ashbury thing" - as he likes to call it now - could only last so long and soon he became supervisor of the South District and suddenly it became "real work," he said.

Now, work meant ocean search-and-rescues and cliff rescues and EMT training and he says "there aren't a lot of pleasant stories from those times."

Instead of romping with Mary Tyler Moore and Art Carney, he was now fishing "jumpers" off Mile Rock Beach and recovering suicides from among the dunes.

"There was something about being at the edge of the country, where you have vast distances right next to an urban environment," he said. "There were a lot of problems and a lot of romanticism and some terrible stories and sad days."

He says he still can't shake that time he followed the ambulance - with the mother who didn't speak a word of English - to the hospital to identify the body of her drowned son.

And then there was the little girl, couldn't be older than 12 he says, who was struck while trying to cross the Great Highway.

Kirby said she was carrying her baby sister when hit.

Pause.

And there wasn't much that could be done for either of them.

"I didn't like that stuff too much and it wasn't what I signed up for," he said.

So after saying "hasta luego" to his girlfriend Beth, he took off for a job as an outdoor recreation director at an Army base in Hanau, Germany.

He calls this the beginning of his "snow-bunny period."

"I ran three checkout centers that supplied skis and kayaks and camping equipment to the soldiers," he said. "These were the Reagan years of wasteful government spending so I had an unbelievable budget."

With $240,000 to spend, he ordered volleyballs, tents, backpacks and thousands of pairs of skis and bindings - so much so that the base had to give him a warehouse just for storage.

And although he said the soldiers were more interested in "ogling" the women in town, he posted fliers for summer skiing trips to Austria and rented 44-passenger tour buses for retreats to the Dachstein Glacier.

To this day he still calls the job "guilty good."

"There was $80,000 in the budget that I didn't spend and I thought the commander was going to pat me on the back for saving the U.S. government all this money," he said. "But he called me in one day - and this was when I was all anti-establishment - and he said I was a stupid son-of-a-bitch and a g-damn hippie because this is the U.S. government we're dealing with and you can't give money back.

"So I went on a spending spree and these trucks would come in and dump all this brand-new equipment on the warehouse floor and the soldiers were just rolling their eyes thinking 'What the hell.'"

During that time, he said he went to the Berlin Wall to feel "the electric fear" at Checkpoint Charlie and see the East German border guards with their machine guns and spotting scopes.

"I took every opportunity to travel and see and experience things and it was three years of long sustained vacation," he said. "I was just chasing these hedonistic adventures and giving little thought to my career or my future."

And then - after he mentions the Army's Ration Cards that allowed him $6 bottles of Glenfiddich and $2 cartons of cigarettes, which he passed among friends - he pauses and thinks of that old brick fort and those children outlined against the San Francisco blue.

Maybe it's the smell of the Dumpster squid or the sun off their smiles he remembers but for a moment it's as if - in that context - everything before and everything after makes sense.

And just as quickly he's back.

Now, he says, he's 30 years old and he's returned to the states to oversee the disposal of hazardous waste - like paint thinners and UDMH rocket propellant - at remote Army bases and missile silos.

"I spent five years doing that stuff and boy was I happy to leave," said Kirby. "I was dealing with barrels of crap and cans of sludge and 75 percent of the time I was traveling to these windswept, isolated places. I'd get home after two weeks and be lucky if I could wash my clothes before I was off again."

By then, a wife and a mortgage and two kids forced him to "grow up and grow up fast" and he says the transition back to the Park Service was familiar and easy.

"I was no longer a boy and I remembered what my father had always told me about doing something you love," said Kirby. "I reverted back to what I was most comfortable with and for me that's always been the Park Service."

Perhaps it's his "grasshopper" past that made Kirby such a success in Petersburg, Va.

He spent nine years in charge of the park there - reaching out to black communities, inviting urban school children and always seeking to make the battlefield more relevant.

He laughs now and says how nice it would be to start there in the middle - with the beach and the children and the sun and the blue - and forget about his days barking and hitchhiking.

But he doesn't really mean it.

"I wouldn't give it up for anything. Those are the kind of things that wipe the naiveté out of your soul. You learn wits and street smarts and how to size somebody up fast," he said. "It's all just a rite of passage and sure there were some tough times but it's part of growing up.

"What always slays me is when I talk to my mom and she says 'Why Bob you turned out so good.'"

Even after all these years, he says, there's still a little surprise in her voice.

Kirby's appointment

In March, Bob Kirby was named the superintendent of Gettysburg National Military Park. He spent the previous nine years in charge of the battlefield at Petersburg, Va. and his prior assignments include chief of interpretation at Lowell National Historical Park, Lowell, Mass. 1990-95; as an environmental-protection specialist, Defense Logistics Agency, Ogden, Utah 1986-90; outdoor recreation director with the Department of the Army in West Germany, 1983-86; and assignments as a district ranger, sub-district supervisor, and interpretative ranger at Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco from 1974-83.

Kirby's nomination came after former superintendent John Latschar was reassigned following the discovery of evidence he had viewed sexually explicit images on his office computer. A controversial figure, Latschar was praised by historians and preservationists, but sometimes accused of failing to pay enough attention to local concerns.